01/19/2026
Change: Free Public Talk on Dark Energy Jan. 28th
Our scheduled speaker for Jan. 28th was called out of the country for an urgent international planning meeting. But we have an excellent new speaker. Could you let your audience know? Apologies and thanks.
On Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026 at 7 pm (PST), Dr. Robert Kirshner (Thirty-Meter Telescope Obs.) will give a free, illustrated, non-technical lecture entitled:
“Discovering Dark Energy and New Developments in our Understanding"
in the Smithwick Theater at Foothill College, in Los Altos (see directions below)
The talk is part of the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series, now in its 26th year.
Our Universe has provided many surprises to astronomers. One hundred years ago, Edwin Hubble showed it is expanding. In the 1990s, we found that the expansion is not slowing down as expected, but speeding up. This led to a Nobel Prize in Physics (for our speaker's students) and a consensus that we live in a universe that is made up of invisible dark matter, mysterious dark energy, and only a pinch of the atoms we, and everything we can see in the Universe, are made of. Recent observations indicate that even this picture may be too simple to account for all the evidence. Perhaps the dark energy is not the factor Einstein invented (and discarded) in his ideas about the universe, but something else that evolves with time. Nature is more inventive than human imagination!
Robert Kirshner has served as the Executive Director of the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory since 2022. Prior to that, he was the Head of Science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Having spent 30 years on the Harvard Faculty, he is now Clowes Professor of Science Emeritus, and also Research Professor at the California Institute of Technology. His extensive work on supernova explosions led to his engagement in the pursuit of cosmic deceleration, with the astonishing result that the expansion of the Universe is not slowing down, but speeding up. Kirshner is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the recipient of the 2025 Wolf Prize in Physics, and served as President of the American Astronomical Society. He is the author of the popular book, The Extravagant Universe.
Foothill College is just off the El Monte Road exit from Freeway 280 in Los Altos.
For directions and parking information, see: https://foothill.edu/parking/
For a campus map, to find the Smithwick Theater (Bldg. 1000), see:
https://foothill.edu/map/
Note: Parking lot 1 is closest, with access to the theater by stairs. Parking lot 5 provides access from the same elevation as the theater.
The lecture is co-sponsored by:
* The Foothill College Science, Tech, Engineering & Math Division
* The SETI Institute and
* The Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Past lectures in the series can also be found on YouTube at: http://youtube.com/svastronomylectures
and as audio podcasts at: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1805595
Listen to exciting, non-technical talks on some of the most interesting developments in astronomy and space science. Founded in 1999, the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures are presented on six Wednesday evenings during each school year at Foothil...
